Many of your readers have been listening to the futile...

Thorwald Siegfried

The Winlock (Wash.) News

Many of your readers have been listening to the futile efforts of an evangelist, who attempted to persuade people to accept Christianity by convincing them that Christian Science, in which the world experiences again the redemptive work of the Christianity of the early centuries, is a work of the devil. In justice to the Christian Scientists of your community and in order that your readers may have definite information about Christian Science, I would like to have space for a few statements of fact about it.

First, Christian Science distinguishes between the real man, described in the first chapter of Genesis as created in God's image and likeness, and the earthy man, whose construction by the Lord God is described in the allegory which begins with the fourth verse of the second chapter. It points out that the latter is unreal, the counterfeit and opposite of the former; that humanity has quite generally believed itself to be of the nature of the earthy man, and accordingly has sought health and happiness in matter, where it does not reside.

Christian Science proves that man is really spiritual, godlike, now; that the belief that man is material is only a belief, nothing more. And, however unbelievable it may seem to one who has not applied Christian Science as taught in its text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," it becomes perfectly apparent when sin, disease, discord, and poverty vanish into vacuity. It must follow that human, material personality is of no avail in finding the kingdom of heaven, and that the human will or so-called mind, expressing itself in hypnotism and suggestion, cannot really heal anything. To be really effective, material man must "deny himself," as Jesus pointed out; he must become conscious of the everlasting union with and dependence on God of real manhood; he must learn to say, "I can of mine own self do nothing." This is the transformation which the Christ brings to human thought "by the renewing of your mind," as Paul phrased it.

Pride rebels at the self-abnegation of material personality demanded by real Christianity. Spiritual selfhood is the blessed substitute for self-assertive life in matter, typified by that earthy man already referred to, of whom the Scripture says that "every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." Mrs. Eddy finds the spring of that antagonism against Christian Science in unwillingness to exchange material pride for spiritual humility. On page 345 of Science and Health she says, "This thought of human, material nothingness, which Science inculcates, enrages the carnal mind and is the main cause of the carnal mind's antagonism."

Finally it may be said that any system which assumes that it knows exactly what man is,—that he is a material organism, and that this material organism is the image and likeness of God,—must end in confusion. Christian Science, on the contrary, discovers God, Spirit, as the only creator; it stands on the Scriptural declaration that the real man is made in His image and after His likeness, and therefore declares that this material personality is not man at all, but only a false belief about man; and that the real man is spiritual, like God, who is Spirit and Love. This correct knowledge of man heals the sick, as any one can prove by reading Science and Health for himself.

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